Earlier this week the World Health Organisation ranked the globe's biggest drinking nations—but it didn't quite tell the entire story. This is what the data looks like if you ignore abstainers.

Those pesky non-drinkers skew the average slightly, you see. While most of Belarus—the highest consuming nation according to the WHO—drinks, then, it doesn't mean that it drinks as hard as the minority number of soaks in other countries. So The Economist took the WHO data, stripped out the abstainers, and looked at the results afresh.

Turns out that while almost 90 percent of Chad's population don't drink, the 780,000 drinkers it is home to put away almost 34 liters of pure alcohol a year. Compare that to the Belarus, where people put away just 17.5 liters averaged across the population, and clearly the guys in Chad party pretty damn hard. Similarly for UAE and Gambia. The UK and U.S. still languish down the table, though. [Economist]

The World Health Organisation has released a new report which reveals the heaviest drinkers in the world—and the U.S. really doesn't get a look in.

The average U.S. resident drinks 9.2 liters of pure alcohol a year, according to the Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health 2014. Compare that to the 17.5 litres drunk by the hard-partying population of Belarus, who top the drinking tables, and the relatively-conservative 11.6 litres consumed by citizens of the UK. On average, people around the globe drink 6.2 litres of pure alcohol annually.

Measuring consumption between 2008 and 2010, the report also found that 3.3 million deaths worldwide could be directly attributed to alcohol abuse, despite the fact that less than half the world's population (38.3 per cent) even drink booze. The top 10 heaviest drinking nations are all found in Europe. They are: